As of June 30, 2024, amsterdreams has ceased operation. The legal entity has been dissolved. Nobody (well, except the founders) lost any money. We tried something and it didn’t work.

Our motto was: living in Amsterdam does not have to be a dream. We thought we found a way to offer homes as rent-to-own and without involving banks and mortgages. On paper, it worked. In practice, it didn’t.

The main reason we’re throwing in the towel is regulatory burden. From day one, we had to fight an uphill battle. Anything that touches either real estate or blockchain technology was deemed suspicious by not just the regulators but also financial institutions. It took us two months to even get a bank account to pay our web provider. While we eventually found two banks (Knab and Revolut, thank you) who did believe in us, everything continued to be much more difficult than it needed to be. Buying cryptocurrency as a business, just the Ether needed to fuel our engine, proved to be all but impossible. We ended up buying it with the personal account of the CEO.

The European MiCA (Markets in Crypto Assets) regulation could have been a great opportunity to regulate blockchain technology in a lightweight and sensible way, separating bad actors and Ponzi schemes like the defunct FTX from small enterprises that actually want to do some good in the world, like amsterdreams. That did turn out to be a dream. MiCA regulates any real-world asset tokenization to pieces, requiring a far larger organization than amsterdreams would have our customers pay for. The organization required, and fees to be paid for licensing, would have required amsterdreams to be a kind of bank, with a compliance department and lawyers. The cost would have been bearable with 100 million euro in a real estate portfolio and hundreds of paying customers, but as a start-up? Forget it.

That’s why we closed our doors on June 30, the day that MiCA took effect. Also as a kind of silent protest to overbearing regulators who kill entrepreneurialism under the guise of consumer protection. A good regulator would write regulations that enable innovation while protecting the innocent from bad actors. A blanket of regulations is the easy way out. So take that, EU. That will teach you. Ha!

Finally, we also have to admit that we did not succeed before MiCA. Our plan was to raise about a million euro from early adopters to begin with, or 1,000 AMS, to buy two or three apartments in Amsterdam and offer them to our customers. We would then have shown the world that this is real, it is working, and we would have perfected our operations before scaling up. But we never got near that level of investment, which can only mean we did not get the confidence from investors that we needed.

To those of you who did believe in us and joined us on this journey, thank you. The dream of living in Amsterdam is still alive. This just wasn’t the way to realize it.

We’ll keep our Facebook page at facebook.com/amsterdreams open if anyone wants to reach out. Until then, so long!